February 28, 2016

Tyche's Grid Survey Shows Abandoned Land Far From Catastrophic in SL

Grid Survey Shows Abandoned Land Far From Catastrophic

I've discovered a shocking thing -- you can't post on the Second Life forums if you include an outside link -- as I do in this post to Tyche's survey.

That is the worst of the practices of gaming sites like World of Warcraft. I would have though Linden Lab was above such jealous pettiness.

So here's my post with links to her pages:

I was reading Tyche Shepherd's grid survey which is extremely interesting and useful, especially because the Lindens no longer publish economic statistics.

We always hear the gloom and doom that the Mainland is dying and is "all" abandoned but this survey lets you know that abandoned land is only 18.2 to 18.8% of the Mainland. That may seem terrible, and it's a figure that has been increasing -- from 13% two years ago -- but it's not literally the end of the world.

Now, Linden Lab owns 54% of the mainland, which consists of 6,744 sims.

The total grid is 24,754 sims. I can remember when they were 32,000 in the heyday -- but again, this is not the die-off everyone imagines. It ensures a completely respectable and even enviable revenue for Linden Lab, which Facebook or Twitter could only envy despite their vastly more large memberships and concurrency.

There are about 39,198 Linden homes. That doesn't mean premium accounts are down from *their* heyday of 90,000 plus, because not everyone has a Linden home. In fact, Tyche writes "44,936 landowners (74%) pay no tier above their premium subscription" -- i.e. 512 parcel owners -- so that means there isn't such a great drop in premium account as imagines -- although they are not likely 85,000 plus, just adding those figures together, because there are the Charter Members that got the 4096 for life -- I don't know how many people are in that class.

Yes, more land is being abandoned than purchases, but it's not a disaster, far less than even I imagined when I fly around and see abandoned land. I also fly around and see land growing and people buying entire sims even on the Mainland so life goes on.

Most likely the fact that Linden owns half the Mainland now fed their decision not to make a Mainland in Project Sansar (not to mention their abandoning the effort to make contiguous geography). In part, they own land because they decided to create themed areas with easements, like Bay City or Nautilus, and if anything, they should do more of it. They also have some tied up in areas developed by the Moles, and that's a good thing.

As I've said before, the Lindens could cure the glut of abandoned land by creating automatic processes for anyone currently on a sim being able to buy the parcels, which should be divided into 512 pieces, so that they don't have to fear flippers and griefers. Then after 30 or 90 days -- they hold abandoned land for years so they shouldn't mind that! -- it opens up to the public. If they open this up on a mass basis a lot of it still wouldn't sell even at $1/m but it would be there fo people to develop.

I had another idea: if the Lindens would consoldiate some of this abandoned land, they could then put Linde ponds in the middle of certain tracts as they did on the Heterocetera continent -- although often imperfectly as they allow private ownership of pond water, which creates havoc. But once they made Linden-protected ponds or creeks, they would instantly sell more parcels on the Mainland.

There is nothing that jacks up the value of land like Linden protected water -- or Linden protected anything, even a cobblestone square with market stalls with free Linden content or whatever.

If they did this, I'm confident they'd start selling more of this stuff.